I liked their first albums, and ‘More Adventurous’ was still good, but I didn’t even bother listening to their last and fifth one ‘Under the Blacklight’, since the song ‘The Moneymaker’ was quite disappointing.
But Rilo Kiley no more? I guess it was predictable, with Jenny Lewis having her Jenny and Johnny side-project with her boyfriend, Blake Sennett doing his own thing with ‘The Elected’ (they have just released an album ‘Bury Me In My Rings’), bassist Pierre de Reeder taking care of his ‘Little Record Company’, and drummer Jason Boesel having released a solo album, ‘Hustler's Son’, and attending this year's Cannes festival with girlfriend Kirsten Dunst, they were on hiatus; it was not really realistic to see them recording together again.
Well, that’s it, they are officially over!
Blake Sennett, in an interview with Spinner, was pretty bitter about the band:
‘I just felt like there was a lot of deception, disloyalty, greed and things I don't really want to submit myself to, I had related that frustration to music but I just thought, 'I'm not going to put myself in that position again,' so I said, 'Fuck that, I can't do this anymore.’
‘That being said, it was probably immature and that came from a place of ego. I think that stuff will rear its head in anything you do, depending on the personnel you surround yourself with; things change overtime and people change and relationships change.’
The band released their first album ‘Take-Offs and Landings’ in 2001, so people and relationships have time to change in 10 years.
He added this in his description of relationships between band members:
‘Relationships, like Woody Allen said, are either moving forward or they're moving backwards, they either degrade or they grow and it was degrading to some certain extent in Rilo Kiley.’
‘I was mad at music — and it wasn't music's fault. It was our fault as bandmembers, or partners, or friends.’
But Rilo Kiley has still plenty of fans and the band has a lot of unreleased songs that may be released one day:
‘I think we're going to try and release a two-disc set of 40 songs, or something. I think that can be more considered like our last release, to me. But I don't know', he added.
And Sennett would agree with me, as he admitted their last album was not that great:
‘I don't think it was our best record by far, I think that it could have been our best but I think we were under pressure. There were some of our best songs on that record but some of our worst songs.’
‘Like, 'Dejalo' and '15' — I didn't like those songs. They're OK, but we have a ton of old tracks that are better than a lot of the stuff that did make the record.’
Without pointing fingers at anyone, he has definitively closed this chapter of his life…. But now it is over, is he gonna tell us what Rilo Kiley means?